Leni Riefenstahl

Leni Riefenstahl, who died on Monday aged 101, was perhaps the most talented
female cinema director of the 20th century; her celebration of Nazi Germany
in film ensured that she was certainly the most infamous.

Leni Riefenstahl, speaking in Potsdam, in 1999.Photo: AP

12:01AM BST 10 Sep 2003

The last surviving member of the cultural elite of the Third Reich, Leni Riefenstahl was for 50 years vilified by successive generations as Hitler's film-maker, a propagandist whose images - notably her films of the Nuremberg rallies - exulted in German strength and glorified the Nazi creed of racial purity.

Her films were the more dangerous, it was held, because of their dazzling beauty. She had not created crude disinformation, but images that retained an insidious power to seduce even an audience fully apprised of the Nazis' evils. They were films that radiated such love of the subject-matter that many felt that they could have been made only by someone who shared Hitler's goals.

Leni Riefenstahl spent half of a very long life trying to counter these charges. Her claim that she was merely an artist who had objectively recorded history as it happened convinced few who had seen the product of her adoring lens. More valid was her observation that she had shared her mistaken admiration of Hitler with millions of other Germans, a veneration that had been rendered abhorrent to them only by hindsight.

It was in the mid-1930s, before the outbreak of war or the revelation of the Holocaust, that Leni Riefenstahl made the two films on which her moral and artistic reputation rests. Habitually drawn to men of charisma and vision, she had been overwhelmed by seeing Hitler speak at a rally in 1932. She would later claim that she had never understood the implications of his political ideas (despite her fondness for reading Mein Kampf on set), only that she knew she must meet him.

She was then principally known as a film actress, and Hitler was an ardent admirer. He and Goebbels had grasped the importance of film to their plans for "public enlightenment", and invited Leni Riefenstahl to record a Nazi party rally at Nuremberg. Having rushed to meet Hitler, and still fascinated by him, she felt she could not refuse.

Her first attempt, Victory of Faith (1933), was never released, for several of the leading players were purged by Hitler shortly after the rally. Undaunted, she recorded the next one. She later contended that she had only filmed what happened, and certainly it was Albert Speer and not she who had organised the rally; but the film testified that its author had committed her heart and soul to its making. The result, Triumph of the Will (1935), stands with Battleship Potemkin (1925) as the most masterly propaganda film ever made.

Leni Riefenstahl orchestrated a crew of 120 and more than 30 cameras to overcome brilliantly the static, repetitive nature of the rally. She flooded the screen with contrast and movement, drawing on techniques she had learnt while trying to film alpine skiers. The key to her success was the mobility of her cameras, many of which were mounted on special tracks.

Among the film's enduring images is that of the Messianic descent, through clouds, of the Führer's Junkers, the shadows of the aircraft passing over the crowd below. Memorable, too, are shots of the massed banners and torches in the narrow streets, the image of the sun resting in Hitler's palm, and the long walk through the ranks of the SS by the trinity of Himmler, the SA leader Lutze and the Führer himself. Above all, there was the sense of the imposition of the will of one man on a million spectators.

The 61 hours of film she had shot were then bent to Leni Riefenstahl's purpose. She edited them virtually alone, even conducting the score herself. The outcome was emphatically not, as she later claimed, a documentary. Her treatment of events had been too creative and while, in one sense, the result accurately documented the mood of a nation, her filming and editing had turned reality into subjective art and, by shaping the political reactions of an audience, art into propaganda.

A year later she began to make her second remarkable film, a record of the 1936 Olympic Games, held in Berlin. The project was commissioned by the International Olympic Committee, but received the enthusiastic backing of Hitler. Having experienced from Goebbels (whose romantic advances she had spurned) some editorial interference while filming at Nuremberg, Leni Riefenstahl strove harder this time to be free of outside influence.

The result, Olympia, was even more technically dazzling (if more stylised and less powerful) than Triumph of the Will. Cameras were mounted beneath balloons, on rafts, in trenches and under saddles to try to capture the effort of performance.

Critics would later decry her fascination with the athletes' physiques as fascistic; but in truth her interest was born not of racist ends but of the delight she, as a former dancer, took in the human form. She recorded the triumphs of the black sprinter Jesse Owens as flawlessly as those of Aryan athletes.

Leni Riefenstahl then spent 18 months single-handedly compressing 200 hours of film into four hours' viewing. Her aim, in what became one of the greatest feats of film editing, was to preserve in visual terms the separate identity of each discipline.

She accomplished this chiefly by using different tempi: for example, gradually slowing footage of the marathon to suggest the onset of exhaustion; diving competitors were shot to resemble swooping birds, with pairs of frames reassembled in reverse temporal order so as to further slow and prolong the dive.

Olympia was rapturously received in Germany in 1938, but a subsequent tour of America was blighted by her having hotly to deny stories of Jewish persecution in Germany. She was also dogged by rumours that she was Hitler's mistress, a story circulated by her disgruntled press secretary. Years later, however, she admitted that, had Hitler been the "least bit sexy", such was his hold over her that she might have become his lover.

On the outbreak of war, Leni Riefenstahl enlisted as a reporter; but after witnessing a massacre of Polish civilians, she refused to make propaganda films, and spun out the war in abortive projects, notably a version of D'Albert's opera Tiefland. By 1944 her stock with her admirer Hitler had so diminished that she could not stop her brother being sent to die on the Russian Front.

After the war, Leni Riefenstahl was kept under arrest for four years by the Allies, but she was then twice cleared by special courts of having been a Nazi. Yet controversy clung to her, although none of the more sensational charges (that she had knowingly used concentration camp inmates as film extras; had encouraged the Polish massacre she had witnessed; that she had been Hitler's lover) was substantiated.

Meanwhile, she continued to deny all prior knowledge of the true nature of Nazi Germany, citing that as her reason for not having left her country as Marlene Dietrich had done. Over the years she won more than 50 libel actions against those who alleged that she had known the truth all along.

Yet although the power of her films was still acknowledged - in 1960 her peers voted Olympia one of the 10 best films of all time - her skill cost her dear. Plundered by Allied propagandists, many of her images became synonymous with the Nazis, and her reputation meant that she could never make another film; she was not allowed even to edit Tiefland until 1954.

Had her cinema been less memorable, she might have suffered less. As it was, she was condemned by her art and by her longevity to spend half a life tainted with complicity in the Nazis' deeds. If she seemed to feel no need to express remorse for her life, she still had much to regret.

Helene Bertha Amelie Riefenstahl was born in Berlin on August 22 1902. Her father, the owner of a large heating firm, was a fierce disciplinarian who encouraged his daughter's athletic pursuits but disapproved of her artistic temperament. This only made young Leni more determined to do as she pleased, and whilst studying painting at Berlin's Kunstakademie she secretly took lessons in acting and dancing.

She gave her first recital in 1923, and the unrestrained vitality of her dancing soon came to the notice of the producer Max Reinhardt. With his patronage, she made a highly successful tour of Europe, but while on stage in Prague she suffered damage to her knee, abruptly ending her dancing career. Shortly afterwards, she broke off her engagement to Germany's premier tennis player, who had taken the actress Pola Negri as a lover.

A despondent Leni Riefenstahl then happened to see one of the alpine dramas filmed by Arnold Fanck. He was pioneering a genre that was to become extremely popular in Germany, tales of courage, set against mountain scenery, the purity of which appealed to the Aryan soul and provided an uplifting distraction from the economic problems of the Weimar Republic.

Leni Riefenstahl was enthralled by the film and, as she was to do with Hitler, determined to seek out the person who had so moved her. Carried by the mixture of naivety and self-assurance that marked her career, she engineered a meeting with Fanck, who was much taken with her beauty. He wrote a film especially for her, The Holy Mountain (1926), about a dancer turned mountain climber. It made her a star in Germany.

Initially she had had doubts about her aptitude for such films (doubts exacerbated when she broke her ankle during her first skiing lesson), and she also worried about her looks, for she had a squint. But on the screen this only added to her allure.

Films such as The White Hell of Piz Palu (1929) and SOS Iceberg (1933), made under highly dangerous circumstances on location rather in a studio, maintained her popularity. Yet she might have been a still bigger star, had she not lost the role of a cabaret singer to the unknown actress who lived in the flat next to hers. The film was The Blue Angel; the actress Marlene Dietrich.

In 1932 Leni Riefenstahl turned to directing, drawing on her experiences under Fanck and Georg Pabst, the director of Piz Palu and Pandora's Box (1928). Her first film, The Blue Light (1932), a fantasy in which urban rationalism indirectly kills an untamed spirit of the mountains, won the Silver Medal at the Venice Biennale.

It was to an African example of this uncontaminated spirit that Leni Riefenstahl was drawn during the years after the Second World War. On reading Hemingway's The Green Hills of Africa, she found herself enamoured of the image of the continent presented by him, and in 1956 went to Kenya, intending to make a film about the modern slave trade.

The project collapsed, and she was also badly injured in a car accident, but in the meantime she had found a new passion: the Nuba tribesmen of Sudan.

The photojournalist George Rodger had first celebrated the ceremonial wrestling matches of the Nuba and, inspired by his work, Leni Riefenstahl made a number of lengthy visits to a people comparatively untouched by the modern world. Knowing nothing of her past, they accepted her as a friend. The result was several fine books of photographs, including The Last of the Nuba (1974).

By now none of her activities could escape controversy, and her critics argued that these photographs were less a new beginning than an extension of her early work, being a glorification of the human form. Less logical was the charge that the photographs were thus suffused with Nazi ideology.

Leni Riefenstahl remained vital, active and unrepentant into extreme old age. She appeared to be 20 years younger than she was and, at 70, learnt to scuba-dive. Accompanied by her lover, Horst Kettner, a man 40 years her junior, she continued to travel (usually clad in Versace leggings) into her late nineties. In 2000 she survived a helicopter crash in the Sudan while trying to find out what had happened to her Nuba fiends during Sudan's civil war.

She produced several volumes of memoirs, including The Sieve of Time (1992). Few historians accepted the book as accurate, and its banal and disingenuous style was so unlike that of her films that few others can have thought it held the whole truth of her strange life.

She married, in 1944 (dissolved 1946), Peter Jakob, an officer in the Wehrmacht. There were no children.